WASHINGTON — Every weekday at 8 a.m., right after President Bush meets with senior staff, his communications team huddles in a second floor West Wing office to plan new moves in the information war.

Rob Saliterman, the White House director of rapid response, fires salvos throughout the day.

His weapons: e-mails.

The White House digital war room blasts thousands of electronic messages each day, aimed at more than 2,000 targets. They include journalists, Republican staffers in government, radio talk show hosts, television bookers, Internet bloggers and what White House communications director Kevin Sullivan described as other “interested parties.”

Whether trumpeting a presidential speech or seeking to shoot down an unflattering news story, the Bush administration's “rapid response unit” is a place where politics grapples with the 24/7 news cycle — especially in an election year.

“We call it rapid response, but we look at it as being on offense,” Sullivan said. “We want to respond to things that are misleading before they become part of conventional wisdom.”

In recent months, many missives reflect what President Bush and GOP candidates discuss on the campaign trail: the record-breaking stock market, immigration and legislation authorizing a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, and developments in Iraq.

“ 'Tis the season,” Sullivan said. “There have been more stories to respond to as we have gotten closer” to Election Day.

Democrats also take part. For every e-mail in which the Bush administration touts progress, the staff of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., sends a response. A recent example criticized a speech on Iraq by Vice President Cheney with this headline: “Cheney stays the course. Alone.”

“We don't want anything to slip by,” said Rebecca Kirszner, communications director for the Senate Democratic Communications Center, which Reid created to counter the White House. Her group also keeps well-tended lists of e-mail targets.

Bush's digital warriors send several e-mails on a busy day. On Sept. 6, the day Bush proposed his plan for military trials of terrorism suspects, the White House sent at least seven missives. They included two “fact sheets” explaining the program, a list detailing myths and facts about the CIA's interrogations of these suspects, and another titled “Setting the Record Straight” addressed to critics of the plan.

A month later, the White House's rapid response team cranked out four e-mails covering the national intelligence estimate on Iraq, job creation, budget deficits, and Democrats and taxes.

War rooms in politics are nothing new. The term harks back to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign of 1992, when his advisers developed an aggressive strategy to fight attacks. Douglas Sosnik, a former Clinton political director, said e-mails weren't the tool of choice back then because “it was not nearly as ubiquitous in peoples' lives then as it is now.”

The Bush White House began expanding its e-mail strategy in March 2004, according to Sullivan, in response to criticism of its terrorism policies by former National Security Council staff member Richard Clarke. Traffic ticked up in mid-November 2005, as Bush prepared a series of speeches on the Iraq war.

Robert Schmuhl, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, said the e-mail barrage reflects the fact that much of government has turned into a permanent political campaign. He called the result “spincraft, as opposed to stagecraft.”

Sometimes the White House's message can get lost, however. “An e-mail avalanche leads to numbness,” said Lanny Davis, an attorney who handled rapid response for the Clinton administration. “The effect of it is minimal.”